


Absence Of

by scioscribe



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Becoming The Thing That You Most Hate/Fear, F/M, Lima Syndrome, Loss of Humanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-08 19:59:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12261105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: The first time he comes back to life, he has a mouth full of ashes, and it takes him a day to remember his name, a day longer than that to remember his new one. At first, he tries not to use it. He wants to be a man.





	Absence Of

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



> Religious references, brief mention of domestic violence. Insufficient attention paid to how awesome Bobo's coat is.

The drawback of owning Shorty’s is that Purgatory’s townsfolk do wander in, usually already three sheets to the wind and therefore incautious, and tell him lies even he would never have thought to tell. The most recent being that hell is the absence of God.

“Hell is the absence of everything but hell,” Bobo says, and stints on the next shot of whiskey, pours it with a light hand. He’s a long way away from Robert Svane, who sputtered the first time he tasted liquor. God, he thinks sometimes, when he’s in a good mood, no wonder Wyatt Earp left him to die, even when the stain from his blood was still on Wyatt’s shirt. He must have been fucking insufferable. So innocent he’d come with cow eyes.

Purgatory attracts theologians. Sinners and free booze draw them in even more.

Theologians and Wild West freaks—he can’t turn around without bumping into one or the other. People telling him all about hell and Wyatt, like he doesn’t know better than anyone.

Hell is the absence of not being on fire.

The angel said he would become a demon: what’s a demon but the absence of a man? So he loses the name of a man, lets Robert burn away, becomes Bobo, like his angel said he would. It’s a dog’s name.

He has a spiked collar, a legacy of the nineteen nineties—his taste, since hell, has run to volume rather than quality, turn everything up loud and bright so he remembers he’s alive—and one night Willa puts it on him, the silver buckle tight against his throat, his Adam’s apple. He can touch silver without being burned. He can even touch Willa without being burned, though she always brings out the yellow in his eyes. She’s stopped mentioning it, but he knows it’s still true. He can feel it: the hellfire pressing forward like a migraine, making his thoughts go animal-simple and human-brutal and demon-patient.

When they leave this place, he’ll wear her collar always, as penance. He tells himself that.

*

The first time he comes back to life, he has a mouth full of ashes, and it takes him a day to remember his name, a day longer than that to remember his new one. At first, he tries not to use it. He wants to be a man.

Knives, guns, bottles—anything that can kill cries out to his hand, says _twitch your fingers and I’ll come to you_.

He tries to do right. He kills another revenant, but then a week later sees the son-of-a-bitch again, walking around with a red smile cut into his throat but a smile just above it all the same. He can’t even do the kind of good that comes with the only gift he’s been given.

So, he thinks, with the first bit of irony he can remember since he died, to hell with it.

Decades later, he tries to figure out how long he lasted, trying to be the exception to the revenant rule. He has Willa by then and he wants to believe that somewhere under the rust of himself, there is something left, something worth salvaging.

Three weeks, the calendars and the almanacs and his memories finally tell him. From the day he coughed up still-smoking cinders to the day he gave in to the urge to slaughter: three weeks. The penny presses exaggerated the swathe he cut through Purgatory back then, but they didn’t lie. He remembers the crack of their dried blood on his face when he smiled. He was starting to smile a lot. He liked it.

*

He tells Willa, “I killed a man before I ever lay with a woman.”

She looks like plaster, his Willa: hard and brittle to the touch but molded so easily by someone who knows what he’s doing. He hates himself for thinking it, hates himself more for knowing it. He is every bruise that was ever on his mother’s face and arms, he is the sour note in Wyatt’s voice when he talked about men who trouble girls, he is the drunken slur of Doc Holliday as he lists sideways in the saloon. Damn him straight back to hell.

“Then you must have left behind a lot of disappointed women,” Willa says. She shifts to lie on her stomach, her long, honey-colored hair falling down her back.

“Oh, well, my talent for murder came more quickly.”

“I don’t know. You can make me come pretty quickly.”

She has no shame: in his day, a woman would have blushed scarlet before saying such a thing, even to her husband. Only a whore would have been so forward. Bobo has lived over a century, but Willa can still surprise him. Perhaps that should worry him: should she even be able to? He is her only window to the world.

But maybe he knows how little he knows himself. He thinks he’s Robert, but he’s not. He tracks in crudity and bloodthirstiness like mud. Willa paints her nails with the polish he brings her and chats idly about how they will pick out a house like a china pattern and kill the people in it, take it as their own. She wants a fireplace. She says she’s cold all the time.

“I like it cold,” Bobo says. “Hell gives you an appreciation for a Canadian winter.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman denied central heating into her thirties, Robert.”

Like most of the things people in Purgatory say about hell, it’s not true. Hell is hard on metaphors, but he can’t expect people in Purgatory to know that. He tries to be reasonable. He remembers being reasonable, once. It was back before he learned to smile, before the tightness of the silver buckle against his throat.

Willa pulls him back to her. “Why did you kill him?”

“The first one?” It takes him a moment to remember. “Because he had a family.”

“A lot of people have families.”

“I know,” Bobo says. “For a long time, I killed a lot of people.”

*

He tells Ward Earp that he has changed.

“You can’t change,” Ward tells him, but it’s bluster: Bobo can smell the desperation on him, the tang of sweat and adrenaline. Ward is weak and stupid and brutal, a man not worthy of a chair across his head in a bar brawl, let alone the Earp name, and he knows it.

But for all of that, Ward is a weapon, and weapons long to be in Bobo’s hands. Even Peacemaker herself can hardly resist him.

He extends his fingers and pulls Ward closer across the gap between them. Ward tries to dig in his heels, but Bobo simply lifts him off them.

He says, “I don’t think you understand me. I’ve changed from who I was. See, I used to be a good man, but I know the world a little better now, well enough to make a compromise, and to know who will make one with me.”

He is sorry when Ward dies, but not that sorry. He has Willa, then, and she is powerful enough to fear and strong enough to love and vulnerable enough to use. He tries to wipe the blood off his hands when she looks at him with those big doe eyes—he settles for going to the well and imagining that he can hear Holliday’s breathing way down deep inside it. But eventually her eyes become less innocent. All virtue is inexperience, and by that point, Willa has experienced plenty. He has happened to her like Clootie happened to him.

He killed so many people because he was lonely. The motives of demons are petty.

And, as it turns out, incidental:

“You’re not lonely now,” Willa says, a note of warning in her voice.

He strokes her back. “No, I’m not lonely now.” It’s true. She is all he needs. She’s the entirety of his heart. At long last, he has this—he has her loyalty, which is all Robert ever wanted, and he knows he has truly given her his, which is all Bobo ever wants, to be Robert again. He is not lonely. His head is crowded with himself, but what is left of his soul has room only for her. He could not survive the loss of her.

*

He survives the loss of her. He sees her younger, wilder sister come to town. He makes plans. It’s amazing, he thinks, how hard he fights to save his own life, when he once gave it up so willingly.

And then it comes to him.

“No,” he says, to the nearly falling-over patron at Shorty’s, the man who thinks hell is the absence of God. He drinks the shot of whiskey: the customer is always fucked. “Hell is the absence of self.”


End file.
